GOP tries to use health care law against immigration overhaul

Article by: David Nakamura and Sandhya Somashekhar

Washington Post

June 16, 2013 - 8:42 PM

WASHINGTON – After spending years unsuccessfully trying to overturn “Obamacare,” Republicans are now attempting to use President Obama’s landmark health-care reform law to derail his top second-term initiative — a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration system.

Conservatives in both chambers of Congress are insisting on measures that would expand the denial of public health benefits to the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants beyond limits set in a comprehensive reform bill pending in the Senate.

In the House, Republicans are considering proposals that would deny publicly subsidized emergency care to undocumented immigrants and force them to purchase private health insurance plans, without access to federal subsidies, as a requirement for earning permanent legal residency.

In the Senate, Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has endorsed an amendment to a comprehensive immigration bill he helped negotiate that would deny health benefits to immigrants for five years after they become legal residents — two years after they would be eligible to become citizens under the legislation.

Some Republicans, eager to capitalize on public uncertainty about the complexities of the Affordable Care Act, are also casting the immigration legislation as a similarly unwieldy law.

The immigration bill “reminds me of a more recent piece of legislation: Obamacare,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said on the Senate floor last week. “It grants broad new powers to the same executive branch that today is mired in scandal for incompetence and abuse of power. Total cost estimates are in the trillions. And rather than fix our current immigration problems, the bill makes many of them worse.”

The insertion of the politics of health-care reform — one of the most polarizing issues in Washington — into the immigration debate threatens to split open the emerging bipartisan coalitions that are crucial to passing a bill.

This month, Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, blamed a standoff over health-care benefits for his decision to drop out of bipartisan talks with seven colleagues who were negotiating a House alternative to the Senate immigration proposal. That has forced House leaders to proceed with a series of smaller-scale proposals next week in lieu of a sweeping agreement.

“When I joined the group, I was told that the aliens would have to pay for their own health care,” Labrador told Fox News. “Now that has changed. And I can’t agree to all of the exceptions.”

Frustrated Democrats argue that Republicans are picking a fight where one does not exist. In both chambers, Democrats say, they have agreed that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for public benefits — including health-care subsidies and Medicaid — as they embark on a path to permanent legal status, which would take at least 10 years under the Senate plan.

“We have said since day one … that undocumented people will not have access to subsidies in the Affordable Care Act,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said last month. “Any thought that we want to do something different than that is simply not true. … No need to even discuss it.”

Under current law, illegal immigrants and legal residents of less than five years are mostly barred from receiving benefits under Medicaid. That restriction does not apply to poor immigrants who show up at hospital emergency rooms, however.